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If U.S. recovery is slow, Alabama's economic recovery even slower

fredgraph.png

The above chart compares total jobs in the U.S. to total jobs in Alabama. By scaling down the axis on the right, the two series can be compared more closely. While the two economies moved similarly between 2004 and 2010, the story has been different over the past 27 months.
(Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis)

Alabama's economic recovery has been even slower, as measured by at least two significant metrics.

The first is job growth (see above chart). Despite the fact that total U.S. employment is about 70 times larger than Alabama's, the two saw similar changes in jobs added or lost between 2004 and 2010. Alabama's run-up was a bit stronger -- the state's jobs total grew by 7 percent from Jan. '04 to Dec. '07, while the U.S. grew by about 6 percent. But then Alabama's downturn was bit more harsh, too. With those two trends combined over six years, total jobs in the U.S. had basically returned to their level from the start of 2004, while Alabama was down by about 1 percent.

More recently, Alabama's economy has diverged from the national trend. From Jan. '11 to March '13, the number of jobs supported by the U.S. economy grew by 3.7 percent -- nearly three times greater than the growth seen in Alabama, where jobs are up just 1.3 percent. As shown above, plotting job growth for each economy on a separate axis shows how Alabama's economy has lagged over the past 24 months.

The second difference between the U.S. recovery and Alabama's is in housing. Nationally, housing is "at last showing signs of a sustained rebound," the Journal article says. But while average home prices across the country increased 10 percent between March 2012 and March 2013, Alabama prices fell by roughly 3 percent.

Updated to correct an error comparing the size of the U.S. economy to that of Alabama.